Looking back at 2017: Top Picks from BMC Biology

The construction of a digital brain; an evolutionary context to the microbiome; biologists hacking genomes – to begin 2018, the editors of BMC Biology have assembled a selection of their favourite articles published in 2017.

Fortunately, genomics is being pushed further too, with the development of new sequencing technologies and large collaborative efforts. Last year, BMC Biology published the full genome for white Guinea yam. This effort by an international group of scientists lays the groundwork for improving this important African crop. For a perspective on how this research supports food production and to find out why yams are not sweet potatoes, read the authors blog!

Caterpillar of Helicoverpa armigera. Image credit: Gyorgy Csoka.

Understanding the genomics of a crop’s pests is also crucial for food production

There is no talk of innovations in genomics without mentioning gene-editing – most notably relating to CRISPR-Cas9. Gene-editing enables researchers to effectively hack genomes, which, as discussed by our editorial board member Sophien Kamoun, can be employed to greatly accelerate evolutionary processes.

Neuroscience has similarly seen a boost in terms of the technologies and methods that greatly expand the repertoire of questions that can be asked.

This plethora of new technologies is reflected in our series, New Tools for Neurobiology, covering the range of new methods being applied to the study of the brain.

Image adapted from Q&A by Ed Boyden and colleagues; originally published by Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Biotechnology, copyright 2016, and adapted with permission

How to visualize the brain is a recurring topic.

In their review article, Josh Morgan and Jeff Lichtman discuss the challenges of dealing with big data, and how research relying on high-resolution electron microscopy effectively leads to digitization of the brain tissue. How such a “digital brain” can be effectively explored remains a challenge to be reckoned with.

Viviana Gradinaru, in her Q&A, covers two complementary techniques: tissue clearing, which can render whole organisms transparent, and optogenetics, which enables the control and monitoring of neuronal populations in live animals. Combined use of the two provides a map of both neural networks, and neural activity.

In his Q&A, Ed Boyden discussed Expansion microscopy, a technique developed by his lab that offers an alternative to large, powerful microscopes – instead, samples themselves are made bigger, using an expandable a polymer.

A collective highlight from 2017 was the launch of our “In the Light of Evolution” series, in collaboration with BMC Evolutionary Biology and Biology Direct. The series – which is on-going and welcoming submissions – takes its name from Dobzhansky’s famous essay arguing that a meaningful picture can be drawn from “a pile of sundry facts” in biology only by looking at them in “the light of evolution”.

Evolutionary perspectives on antibiotic resistance – and why it isn’t worse, the microbiome, and “junk” DNA

Other creatures found a home in a Forum highlighting fourteen “non-model model organisms” – whose unique biology can help understanding diverse processes. Water bears in space, regenerating limbs, cells with 16000 chromosomes, bacterial spears, and long-lived killifish were all included in the zoo.

Staying in the water, work from David Kingsley and colleagues helped shed light on how morphological evolution can occur, by looking at dorsal spines of stickleback fish. A video abstract for the paper, shown below, describes the work, which shows that a ratio of gene products, rather than simple amino acid changes or gene expression levels, can shape population differences.

Lastly, in 2017 BMC Biology offering registered reports and direct transfers from BioRxiv, and we hope to see more of both in 2018. . We are sincerely grateful to all of our authors and reviewers of 2017, and are excited to see what great research 2018 will deliver.